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Reports

This report scrutinizes the Israeli solar energy industry by exposing corporate involvement in commercial solar fields and residential solar systems that have been built on occupied Palestinian land, particularly in the Jordan Valley. It also provides a legal analysis of Israel’s violations of international law as an occupying power and the companies’ breaches of business and human rights frameworks. Finally, the report illustrates the intricacies of the captive Palestinian market, highlights the Israeli politics of debts and examines the viability of the Palestinian renewable energy market under occupation.

This flash report comes as a follow up report for Who Profit’s in depth report titled “Greenwashing the occupation: The solar energy industry and the Israeli occupation”, which was published in February 2017. While the latter exposes the political economy of Israeli solar energy in the occupied West Bank, particularly in the Jordan Valley area, this flash report sheds light on Israel’s capitalist ventures of solar energy projects in the Naqab (Negev) area where the native population of Palestinian Bedouins, faces acute and severe living conditions alongside forcible displacement policies.

Israeli banks provide the financial infrastructure for all the activities of companies, governmental agencies and individuals linked to the continuing occupation of Palestinian land. The following report, titled Financing Land Grab: The Direct Involvement of Israeli Banks in the Israeli Settlement Enterprise, focuses on the central role that Israeli banks play in construction and infrastructure projects in West Bank and East Jerusalem settlements and in providing loans to regional and local councils of settlements in the West Bank. The findings of this report reveal that all Israeli banks except Dexia Israel provide special loans to construction and infrastructure projects in settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. In addition, all Israeli banks with no exception provide loans and financial services to local and regional councils of Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

Private security companies in Israel play an active role in the occupation of Palestinian land and control over Palestinian people. Private security guards operate checkpoints and guard settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. These security guards have policing powers, they bear arms and are entitled to use force in performing their duties. In the settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the private security guards, who are hired by the state of Israel to guard the settlements, de facto serve as a private police force that serves the settlers population. The employment of private security guards enables state authorities to provide security services only to the settlers, without acknowledging or meeting the security needs of the Palestinian communities around the settlements. This situation creates an inherent inequality between the Palestinian and the Jewish population in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Since the early days of the 1967 occupation, Israel has used heavy construction machinery in order to strengthen its hold over the Palestinian territories and Palestinian people by “establishing facts on the ground.” As the Israeli heavy machinery market is based on import, multinational corporations supply the local demand. This report will describe in depth how – in the hands of the Israeli army, Israeli authorities, settlers and corporations operating in the OPT – construction machinery became a vital component of the occupation mechanism.

Through three types of “non-lethal” crowd control weapons as case studies, the following report highlights the harmful consequences of such weapons, including their potentially lethal effects. Additionally the report addresses how the occupied Palestinian territories are being used as a lab for testing new weapons for civil oppression on humans, in order to label them as “proven effective” for marketing abroad.

Who Profits' report concerns the major Israeli agricultural export companies presently operating in occupied territories. The report demonstrates the severe implications of an Israeli-only agriculture in occupied Palestinian and Syrian lands. For the full report click here.

This report describes the involvement of Israeli and multinational pharmaceutical industries in the occupation. As the pharmaceutical industry is a highly globalized arena, the report reveals some of the ways in which Israel's occupation of Palestinian lands offers opportunities to exploit the captive Palestinian market. Concurrently, the report describes the development of a vibrant but struggling Palestinian industry. For the vast majority of the Palestinian population, this situation generates higher prices of basic health products, which is especially troubling in light of the fact that the economic situation continues to deteriorate.

This report investigates the business and trade of Ahava – Dead Sea Laboratories which is a private Israeli cosmetics corporation that operates from the occupied West Bank. The report shows that Ahava extracts the mud from occupied Palestinian territory, thereby exploiting Palestinian natural resources.

In the report about Hewlett Packard's direct involvement in the occupation, the company is used as a case study to discuss the role of international and local corporations in Israel's mechanisms of surveillance and control over the occupied Palestinian territories.

A new report by Who Profits maps the involvement of the Israeli wine industry in the occupation of the West Bank and the Syrian Golan Heights and traces some of the ways in which it masks this involvement. For this purpose, this report surveys the Israeli wine industry, maps the vineyards and wineries in the occupied territory and traces the connections between the main Israeli wine producers and this settlement industry. Our report demonstrates that all of the major Israeli wineries use grapes from occupied territory in their wines.

Using SodaStream as a case study, a new report by Who Profits discusses key issues in industrial production in illegal West Bank settlements. SodaStream is a manufacturer of home beverage carbonating devices, whose main production site is in the West Bank Settlement of the Mishor Edomin Industrial Zone. The report provides an extensive overview, including the identity of the manufacturers, employment conditions, land confiscation and trade in settlement products.